ESPN Launches 3D Channel for World Cup But Few Can Watch

ESPN staff works on its 2010 World Cup preview broadcast from a control room in South Africa (Photo: ESPN/Zute Lightfoot)

ESPN launched its 3D cable and satellite channel on Friday to show 25 matches from the World Cup soccer tournament for the first time ever. Perfect: broadcasting a sport Americans don’t care about to a device none of us have.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, because The World Cup is a big deal even here, and 6.2 million 3D-enabled television sets are predicted to sell this year worldwide according to a Displaybank report. iSupply says four percent of Americans purchasing new televisions reported choosing the 3D option, so somebody apparently has these things.

Despite industry optimism about 3D television taking off over the next four years, nowhere is it written in stone that 3D will become as widespread as HD television is today. But ESPN vice president of strategic business planning and development Bryan Burns tells Wired.com that the company sees no real distinction between the challenges of switching to HD a few years back and those of switching to 3D today.

“We have an amazing advantage: We’ve been here before,” said Burns. “Seven and a half years ago when we launched ESPN HD — this is just like that, it’s like a mirror image. [As for how 3D will roll out,] I don’t know. I say, ‘we’ll figure it out,’ which is the same thing I said seven years ago. Our company has a rather incredible track record of involving ourselves with emerging technologies before things are really finished or finalized, both from the standpoint of technology and of knowing what consumers really and truly want or need.”

He makes a good point — like 3D, the switch to HD required new cameras and television sets, and for a while, insiders joked that there were more HD transmitters in America than receivers. HD caught on quickly after that, but this time around, the revolution requires 3D glasses to be televised. HD, on the other hand, you can watch with your plain old eyeballs.

Hardly any households or even bars are equipped with 3D sets or the expensive glasses required to view home models. Thus, ESPN-3D launches to the sound of one hand clapping after two years of preparation. Among the places you can watch: certain ESPN restaurants, participating 3D movie theaters, and your friend of a friend who has a 3D TV and service from Comcast, DirecTV or AT&T– assuming he or she has enough hundred-dollar-plus glasses on hand so that everyone can see (each set only comes with one pair).

“We see a world of going from BYOB to BYOG [Bring Your Own Glasses] — or maybe both,” said Burns, although 3D television manufacturers’ glasses are not yet guaranteed to be interoperable with each others televisions — a problem he sees the consumer electronics industry solving within a year if not sooner. (This is a crucial point, given the cost of the glasses and the importance of “BYOG”; anyone looking at buying a 3D TV would do well to wait until a standard is hammered out.)

As for the behavioral obstacle to people taking the leap of donning glasses for regular television viewing, Burns says it’s mostly in our minds.

“What we have found, both anecdotally and in consumer researh, and others have found the same thing, is that consumers will first recoil from glasses,” said the ESPN vice president. “Consumers are saying they don’t like it, then they put them on, and once they’re watching, they say, ‘Oh, that’s no big deal.'”

For now, the audience for ESPN-HD is incredibly limited. Niclas Ericson, television director for FIFA, the international soccer organization that runs the World Cup, said in April that he expected “at least a few hundred thousand per match” worldwide — an inconsequential number next to the over 26 billion cumulative viewers expected to tune in to the regular broadcast.

Complicating matters further, ESPN-HD only accepts advertisements created in 3D for its channel. Advertisers must be cajoled into spending 30 to 40 percent more to create 3D ads, according to executives cited by the WSJ, and aren’t yet sure how to get the most out of the medium. Besides, any household with a 3D televisions almost certainly has a DVR for skipping commercials anyway.

Nonetheless, Gilette, Pixar, Proctor and Gamble and Sony created 3D ads to show during ESPN-3D’s broadcasts of the World Cup that drew “oohs and aahs” at a press preview in New York. If that’s any indication, people could actually be more likely to watch 3D ads than they are 2D ads, in much the same way Superbowl commercials seem to attract almost as much attention as the game itself. In any case, because sports happen live, they’re less vulnerable to users skipping through ads in the recorded version.

ESPN runs a lab in Austin, Texas where it watches how people watch television. The network plans to test its 3D World Cup soccer broadcasts there to see how they react to the broadcast and the ads — information that will prove invaluable as the company tries to attract a bigger audience to its new 3D channel.

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